


Love

by orphan_account



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Black Family, Drama, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Father/Daughter, Gen, Graphic descriptions of violence, Matriarchy, POV Second Person, Pedophilia, Pre-Hogwarts, Rape, graphic description of rape, non-con, the 1900s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-12
Updated: 2014-06-12
Packaged: 2018-02-04 10:39:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1776103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love breaks your world. It breaks your world at the age of six. (Please heed the warnings.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love

**Author's Note:**

> Beware the entire armada of HP fics that I'll upload over the next couple weeks! I had a lovely flaily discussion with feels and capslock and all the good things with S on Twitter, today, and then I was seized by all my HP feels, more specifically my Black family feels, and I felt the urge to edit and reupload all the HP fics I'd very early on (2008?) posted under the nick 'roterhimmel'... so here we go.
> 
> Most of them are heavily edited, because, well, it's been six years, and we'll just assume my writing's style's improved, yeah? /o\
> 
> Editing this one has been a heartbreak. I never realised I wrote such... _sad_ stuff. Man. I'm depressed now. 
> 
> Please heed the warnings, they're there for a reason.

Love breaks your world.  
  
It breaks your world at the age of six.  
  
\---  
  
There is blood on your thigh, and at first you don’t know what that is. You touch it, wide-eyed, and you can only stare. For a moment you wonder why strawberry jam is suddenly so liquid. You think about never having seen such _red_ jam before, and the intensity of the colour makes you want to taste it. You dip your fingers into the red stuff, and then you watch the pads of your fingers of them in the dim light. If the stuff weren’t so runny, you could imagine it to be only on your fingernails. It would make pretty nail polish.  
  
You put your finger in your mouth, and what you taste isn’t sweetness, isn’t strawberry at all. You taste something that reminds you of licking too long at spoons when you’re trying to catch the last bit of pudding. You look at your finger again, smeared with the jam, and you look at your hand that’s also smeared now. Your leg is red, then, suddenly, too.  
  
The jam doesn’t stop gushing out of your leg.  
  
And then there is a big hand on your jam-leg, and a second later another big hand is on your other leg (that looks like milk, just as white). The hands push your legs apart. You let it happen. You have learned long ago that it’s futile to rebel, in this house. Rebellion only brings more pain. If you just do what you’re told, if you’re good, then nothing happens to you. You just have to do what you’re told, that’s all. Even if you don’t like doing your homework, or reading about goblins or boring wizard wars. Even if you don’t like to share your apple with your brother Alphard.  
  
Even if you don’t like your papa being so close.  
  
\---  
  
Your papa being so close happens like this.  
  
Yesterday night at dinner, your Mother announced that you’d be alone with your papa from tomorrow on. She said she’d have to go with Alphard and Cygnus to your aunt Cassiopeia. You asked why you couldn’t come with them—you’ve been a good girl lately, haven’t you? Your Mother simply said that you were the oldest and that you had the responsibility for the house as long as she was away. _You can’t trust men_ , she’d said. _They’re no use. You’re a woman, and I trust you to be mature enough to take care of everything. I leave your father here, just in case_.  
  
That happened, every now and then. And so far it’s always been okay. And it’s also been okay yesterday evening, because in reality you were happy about it—being alone with your papa. At dinner you merely looked at your Mother, suppressing your grin, saying a polite ‘Yes, Mother.’ But you couldn’t help it—as soon as your Mother turned around, you looked at your papa, and you smiled. And your papa smiled back, winking. You blushed. You always do that, when your papa winks at you. And he does it only with you. And you’re proud of it, because you’re papa’s darling, and papa doesn’t love anyone as much as he loves you.  
  
You’re even allowed to call him ‘papa’; only when you’re alone, but still. It’s something special, for you’re supposed to call your parents ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ and often ‘madam’ and ‘sir’ too. It’s okay for you. You’re not used to anything else. If sometimes a ‘mama’ escapes your mouth, you’re slapped in the face, and your Mother says it serves you right. You agree. You’ll be a woman, and women don’t go wrong, after all. You still have a lot to learn.  
  
But when you’re alone with papa, it’s different. You’re allowed to sit in his lap, also something you’ve never done before. But you like it. It’s a bit strange in the beginning (you’re not used to much physical contact), but then it’s great. Because papa strokes your hair, and he smiles at you, and he talks to you. He tells you stories, and he makes you laugh. He says you can call him papa if you want to, but only when you’re alone, or Mother will be angry. You understand this. Your papa also tells you that only you are allowed to do this. You ask why. And he tells you that it’s because you’re a woman, and women are allowed to do more things than men. So you’re allowed to do more things than your brothers.  
  
He also tells you it’s because you’re his sweet little princess.  
  
And you’ve never been happier.  
  
So you should like your papa kissing your cheek, shouldn’t you? You should. It’s a bit strange, just like sitting in his lap—but after a moment, you smile. It’s pleasant to feel his warm lips against your cheek. And you can also remember having read about such a scene between daughter and father in a book. You like the book, because it’s about a girl being all alone, and soon she meets her father and her Mother, and after that, she isn’t alone anymore. It’s a nice book. And since the father kisses the daughter on the cheek in the book, it’s okay for your papa to do the same.  
  
“Papa,” you say, and your voice is quiet. You just want to say it again because it sounds so nice. It feels like a treasure.  
  
“Yes?” he says, and his breath is warm on your face. You scrunch up your nose; your papa smells like alcohol. You like your papa, but you don’t like this habit of his. He always drinks alcohol whenever Mother isn’t around. “What is it, my little princess?”  
  
“I’m your little princess,” you giggle, because you like hearing it. It makes your cheeks go red. “Then you’re my big prince?”  
  
“If you want me to, I can be your big prince.” Your papa smiles. You smile back automatically, because you like papa’s smile a lot. Your papa is younger than your Mother, and the smile makes him only younger still, more handsome. Like a prince, like your prince.  
  
“So you’ll save me from the bad dragon?” you ask, and your eyes are wide. You’re excited, and you look at your papa expectantly. “With a sword and a shield and a really pretty horse?”

“I can do that,” your papa says, and kisses your cheek again, this time your other cheek, the right one. His hand is on your leg. “I can’t leave my little princess all alone, now.”  
  
You cock your head, and glance at his hand. You wonder if it belongs to the game of the princess and the prince and the pretty horse.  
  
“My little princess is alone all too often,” he continues, and the smile is still there. “Princesses shouldn’t be so alone like this, now, should they? It makes them so sad. Don’t you also think so?”  
  
“I d-don’t know,” you stutter, because suddenly there is papa’s other hand on your other leg. It’s strange. The kiss on your cheek was okay, but this is a bit too much, right now. Papa has never touched you so much before. You’re not touched often. Nobody ever touches you much, except your Mother, when she’s angry, and that’s slapping. This, this quiet, soft touch… it’s unfamiliar. But you don’t say anything about it; why should you? It’s your papa, after all, and he only means well.  
  
He’s different from Mother. Fortunately.  
  
“You don’t know? You don’t know if you like being alone?” your papa says, and his voice becomes lower. “Shall I show you what it is like to be with someone? It will be nice.”  
  
Papa obviously thinks that being alone makes you sad. And maybe he’s right. But in the moment you can’t think about it, because you’re a little confused, and because you try to keep all this happiness under control. Your papa is being so nice, and it’s a very good and very nice thing. You wonder why he’s being like this, all of a sudden, but it’s okay. You don’t ask him why, because it’s your papa. Papa is always good.  
  
He’s different from Mother. Fortunately.  
  
And when he tells you he wants to show you something pretty, of course you say yes.  
  
He tells you to stay quiet, and first you are. But then he touches your stomach and your shoulder and your bottom, and you don’t like that. You don’t say anything, but a sudden jolt of panic in your belly makes your limbs move without your control. You kick suddenly, push him away. You’re not touched often.  
  
He told you to stay quiet and to keep still and you didn’t. You’ve gone against the rules—and you’ve done it even though your father just wanted to give you something nice. He thinks you're alone for too often and that that makes you sad, and he wanted to give you something nice to make his little princess smile. And you pushed him away like that.  
  
You’re a bad girl, you think.  
  
“P-papa,” you say, and your voice is small and shaky. “Papa, I didn’t w-want that, I’m sorry, it was just so weird and—”  
  
“It’s okay,” he says. He smiles as he straightens. “It’s okay. I’m not angry.”  
  
You smile back, and you’re surprised to find that you’re not relieved.  
  
Your papa crawls over you on all fours. You lie with your back on your Mother’s and papa’s bed. Papa said it would work only here. You believed him. But something feels funny in your stomach now, and you realize you’re scared. You’re feeling strange, but you can’t understand why. Everything’s all right—you’ve been bad, but your papa isn’t angry, and your papa smiles.  
  
But right now, you don’t like his smile. It’s a strange smile, his mouth a little crooked, and he still smells like alcohol.  
  
“Papa?” you ask, and you hope he won’t notice the fear in your voice. “Papa, what is it that you want to show me?”  
  
“Just wait for a moment,” he says, and then he sits up. He looks at you and tells you to sit up too. You obey.  
  
Then he reaches for his trousers and unbuckles his belt. He pulls the trousers over his hips. You watch him blankly, and distantly feel something lurch in your belly. You’re feeling nauseous, all of a sudden, but you keep still. You don’t want to be bad again, because then your papa will surely be angry. So you watch your papa pulling down his underwear too.  
  
There is a thing between your papa’s legs, and it’s big and stiff and red and looks heavy. There are hairs around the thing.  
  
Your hands are trembling.  
  
“Stay there,” your papa tells you, and he rises. He sheds his trousers and his underwear completely, and they fall on the floor. He pulls the jumper over his head, and then he is standing before you, naked.  
  
You can’t help but notice that everything about your papa is very, very white, except the thing between his legs. That’s darker.  
  
Your papa crawls back over you. He smiles down at you and promises that he’ll show his little princess something really, really good.  
  
But if the princess wants to see it, she has to touch the thing first.  
  
Your papa takes your hands in his. You’ve never noticed before how big his hands are in contrast to your own. You don’t want to touch the thing, but your papa squeezes your hands. You want to struggle, want to do something against it, want to say you don’t want to do that—but you know that if you fight back, it’ll only be worse.  
  
You’ve never thought you’d have to be careful around your papa too. So far it’s been like this only ever with Mother, that she made you things you didn’t want to do.  
  
You touch the thing. It moves. It twitches. It becomes bigger. It becomes redder. It’s wet at the peak, and there is some strange white stuff. Your eyes are big as you stare at it. Your hands don’t feel the thing because they’ve become numb, somehow. They don’t feel you’re your hands anymore. Maybe it’s because your papa has squeezed your hands so tightly that the pain has made them numb.  
  
Your papa is breathing hard in your ear, as if he’s in pain. His hands are on your arms, and he keeps squeezing firmly. You don’t feel it anymore.  
  
Something about not being able to feel your hands makes you jerk together then, badly. It makes your papa jerk too, because you’ve squeezed the thing too hard. He makes a loud noise, something that is like a long, loud breath with voice. You squeeze your eyes shut tightly, and you think you’re going to be punched now. But there’s nothing.  
  
Your papa only whispers, “Do that again.”  
  
You’re not very sure what he means by that. So you simply squeeze your hands again, and he does the same breath as before.  
  
And then suddenly he pushes your hands away and sits up. He stares at you. His face is red, and it’s not a handsome face anymore. His hands glow, and he grins. You think you like it better when he smiles.  
  
He touches your stomach, and he tears at your skirt. He rips it apart. You lie under him with your naked legs in a blouse and undershorts.  
  
And suddenly... you feel so... _inappropriate_. You feel so wrong. You suddenly think it shouldn’t be like this, that it mustn’t be like this, and that you shouldn’t do this in the bed of your parents. That you shouldn’t do this with your papa. That it’s not a nice thing, but an ugly thing.  
  
A scream fills the room, and you never notice it’s your own.  
  
You also don’t notice what happens next. There’s a lot of motion, and everything is blurry, and the colours are only patches that melt together. You hear two voices screaming, one in pain, one in horror. You wonder which is yours. You kick and punch around yourself wildly, recklessly, and when you feel skin that’s not your own the sickness in your belly turns _mad_ , and you erupt into bursts of magic, uncontrollable and destructive.

It’s over quickly, though, when you feel a harsh sting on your upper thigh. Then it grows dark around you.  
  
\---

There is blood on your thigh, and at first you don’t know what that is. You touch it, wide-eyed, and you can only stare. For a moment you wonder why strawberry jam is suddenly so liquid. You think about never having seen such _red_ jam before, and the intensity of the colour makes you want to taste it. You dip your fingers into the red stuff, and then you watch the pads of your fingers of them in the dim light. If the stuff weren’t so runny, you could imagine it to be only on your fingernails. It would make pretty nail polish.  
  
You put your finger in your mouth, and what you taste isn’t sweetness, isn’t strawberry at all. You taste something that reminds you of licking too long at spoons when you’re trying to catch the last bit of pudding. You look at your finger again, smeared with the jam, and you look at your hand that’s also smeared now. Your leg is red, then, suddenly, too.  
  
The jam doesn’t stop gushing out of your leg.  
  
And then there is a big hand on your jam-leg, and a second later another big hand is on your other leg (that looks like milk, just as white). The hands push your legs apart. You let it happen. You have learned long ago that it’s futile to rebel, in this house. Rebellion only brings more pain. If you just do what you’re told, if you’re good, then nothing happens to you. You just have to do what you’re told, that’s all. Even if you don’t like doing your homework, or reading about goblins or boring wizard wars. Even if you don’t like to share your apple with your brother Alphard.  
  
Even if you don’t like your papa being so close.

You don't fight anymore. Your papa is back above you, and there is blood in his face. You’ve been a bad girl again. You’ve pressed your hands into papa’s face, and now he has bad burns all over his cheeks and forehead and chin. Dimly you wonder how you will explain this to your Mother, because it doesn’t seem like your papa is going to heal the wounds anytime soon. There will be a lot of scars, deep ones. You’ve never been good at controlling your magic.  
  
Your own body is weak. The wound on your leg hurts a lot, so you don’t move your leg. You don’t move at all. You are stiff and rigid like a doll, and you feel like one, like a puppet on strings, with limbs that are not your own.  
  
“I will love you,” your papa whispers into your ear, and normally, you’d be red in the face because of the words, or the closeness. You’re only cold now. “I will love you. You need love. You are always so alone.”  
  
And then he presses the thing inside the hole between your legs. The act of it is brutal, but because this is the body of the puppet on strings and not yours, it doesn’t really hurt. Not your body, anyway. Inside, it hurts. Inside, it hurts so bad you want to scream.  
  
But papa is loving you right now, and you’ve never been loved before. You’ve never felt love before.  
  
You hope you’ll never have to feel it again.


End file.
